Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Learning About Scorpions and snakes

We woke up and got ready early this morning because we were headed on a field trip to the Ecotarium again.

We had time before we left for the boys to play and they decided to set up the tent in the living room again because they remembered that I had told them they could sleep in it tonight. It was great to watch them working together to figure out how they were going to set it up today.

I reminded them that they were very warm in there yesterday and so they might want to find a way to make it cooler.

I also reminded them they needed a way to easily get out in case someone had to go to the bathroom during the night.

They tried to solve these problems, as well as the fact that they needed to make the tent bigger in order for all three of them to fit inside.

However, if they made it bigger the blanket/ sheet didn't reach across all the chairs.

They tried all sorts of different ways until they finally settled on using one of my big fitted queen size sheets to stretch across the top and them using blankets around the outside. They had it set up in no time and were trying it out all morning.

While they played I was reading my newest book Einstein Never Used Flash Cards. It's great and if you have the time I highly recommend it! It's all about how children learn through play. It was funny because I could see evidence of what I was reading every time I looked up.

We headed out for our field trip where we were meeting my sister and nephews again.

Today we met at the Ecotarium. I arrived a bit early and boy was that ever perfect. While the building was not yet opened the otters had just been fed and we got to see them.

They typically are asleep most days during the winter but today they were running around and sliding on the ice, they playfully came right over to us.

It's like they came right over to say "hi!"

We explored the entire Ecotarium from top to bottom, inside and out. We participated in two different animal encounters and learned all about snakes (in particular corn snakes) and scorpions (mostly the emperor scorpion). It was really neat to see the scorpion glow green with a U.V light!

We watched them feed the parrot and clean the cage, we saw the turtles being fed, and watched the bald eagles eat.

We played with fog, wind, and looked at beach sand under a microscope.

They put on a puppet show, played games like checkers, chess, and Nine Man's Morris.